Mary Clear England at Momalemon

MARY CLEAR
ENGLAND

Lovely to meet Mary Clear.

She knows the power of small actions & thus created Incredible Edible
https://www.incredibleedible.org.uk/

Reading her lovely stories on facebook I came across her Ukraine story which gave me the urge to present her as a writer here, as one of MoMA Lemon's Artists. We are all artists, it's just that a lot of grownups lost the knack to be just honest and brave.

I was particularly moved by the Ukraine story because as I read it I imagined Mary chatting to Putin & him listening to her.
To all my friends here & everywhere, to my russian artists friends on here too, Daniil Kovalyov who is Ukrainian. To everyone. I never got politics, I grew up with my Dad having 9 allotments in his prime, growing every vegetable you can think of, on one allotment he kept pigs that I bottle fed from birth, when the sow had too many babies to cope with. A lovely memory of family farming. And Dad bless him, fed his family of 7.

I know Mary & what she has achieved through her beautiful undying vision for a Kinder world, I know that fighting over land is wrong when agriculture is what we depend on, enough of history, this is all we got, let's farm it together.

Mary Clear
Death Activist, fearful and fearless. Lover of life and the power of small actions
Thank you for everything
Pete Kilkenny
16. 02. 2022

"Ukraine"
A Story by Mary Clear
written on Valentine's Day
February 14th 2022

Ukraine has A special place in my heart.

60 years ago at st Francis junior school I met a boy.

He was tiny, puny, grey as a ghost, he smelt like me.

A cloud of paraffin and wee wee

fumes followed us both, the stink of poverty.

His name was Bajec Spitsmar.

I don’t remember any other child only him.

As outcasts we were drawn to each other with out knowing our situation.

One day, how and why I cannot say, i visited his home.

Bajec lived in a prefab a word I didn’t know then.

The house was grey like him , puny and low.

Inside was a vision.

the sun coming through the window highlighted an orange and red dust in the air.

The walls had pictures of saints with snow drifts of orange and red dust. Piled high everywhere was the cloth of kings and priests , orange red and green heaps and heaps of it.

I could feel the orange dust in my mouth.

The house had a smell of onions.

In amongst the piles of royal cloth I heard a call. And he plunged behind a pile and I saw his mother, tiny grey her long braids streaked with the orange dust, she was sitting at a treadle sewing machine ,a thing I had never seen before. She did piece work to keep the wolf from the door, the velvet was from plumbs the cushion company. He told me at night he helped by snipping threads and counting out piles.

I asked why did they do such things they both answered at once

because we are from Ukraine.

From then on I knew that cloth and hard work is the kingdom of the poor, I wanted to stay at that little house buried in soft cloth breathing in the dust and onions, I didn’t want to be ordinary poor I wanted to have saints on my wall braided in fluff and sleep under plumbs velvet.

MoMALemon